Senior Compensation Manager

Waabi, founded by AI visionary Raquel Urtasun, is a leader in Physical AI, shaping how autonomous transportation moves forward with trucks and robotaxis. The company has expanded to include offices in Toronto, San Francisco, Dallas, and Pittsburgh, and is now seeking a Senior Compensation Manager who can work remotely from the US or Canada. This role will suit someone who wants to influence pay strategy at a fast-growing tech company and enjoys partnering with executives, managers, and teams to build scalable compensation programs.

In this remote setup, you’ll align compensation decisions with Waabi’s business trajectory, ensuring pay practices support the company’s growth and evolving priorities. If you’re drawn to applying data and AI to people programs and want to help shape how top talent is rewarded, you’ll likely feel at home here.

To learn more visit: www.waabi.ai

Steering Waabi’s pay story from the ground up

In this role you’ll anchor compensation to Waabi’s growth path, drawing on headcount plans, commercialization milestones, geographic expansion, and funding outlook to guide decisions. You’ll define how base pay, equity, and variable pay harmonize to support where the business is headed, establishing a long‑term philosophy, ranges, and grant guidelines while laying out a roadmap to evolve the framework when needed.

You’ll own the end-to-end annual compensation cycle, administering the compensation tool and partnering with managers and senior leaders to plan outcomes for their teams. You’ll streamline the process and scale it, leveraging AI tools where they add value.

You’ll lead market benchmarking across Waabi’s locations, building a deep understanding of the job architecture and talent marketplace to do job matching, survey submissions, and updates to cash and equity ranges as appropriate.

You’ll build bottoms‑up compensation forecasts with Finance, modeling spend and equity usage against the business plan, and you’ll manage a range of modeling and analysis projects to inform decisions.

You’ll lead compensation enablement and education across the organization, owning how Waabi teaches compensation: training managers on the structure and decision‑making process, helping employees understand total compensation including stock options, equipping Recruiting to structure competitive offers, and building employee communications that tie it together.

You’ll translate complex compensation topics into clear recommendations and trade‑offs for the executive team, and you’ll help prepare compensation materials for board review and discussions.

You’ll ensure pay equity and compliance through regular reviews and adherence to pay transparency and reporting requirements across the U.S. and Canada.

A blueprint for Waabi's pay path

• A bachelor’s degree in Economics, Finance, Business, Human Resources, or a related field
• Seven or more years of compensation experience, ideally in high‑growth technology, including ownership of annual cycles and multi‑location benchmarking
• Proven ability to design compensation philosophy, structures and programs that include base pay, variable pay, and equity
• Strong analytical and modeling skills, with forecasting capabilities and proficiency in benchmarking and survey methods (Radford, Carta, Pave, etc.)
• Executive presence and the ability to communicate clearly with employees, managers, and senior leaders
• Collaborative communication style and the discipline to handle confidential information with discretion
• Willingness to incorporate AI tools to improve workflows
• Open-minded, supportive team player who enjoys helping others
• Passion for self‑driving technologies and solving hard problems

• Experience planning compensation for a private company as it evolves through revenue, funding, and maturity
• Experience preparing compensation programs for board review
• Direct exposure to HiTech, AI, or AV settings with insight into how talent markets influence pay
• Hands‑on familiarity with AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT) to automate compensation analysis, modeling, or cycle workflows

The US yearly salary range for this role is: $175,000 - $260,000 USD in addition to competitive perks & benefits. Waabi US Inc.’s yearly salary ranges are determined based on several factors in accordance with the Company’s compensation practices. Note: The Company provides additional compensation for employees in this role, including equity incentive awards and an annual performance bonus.

Pay, perks and practical details

The role offers a competitive package with equity awards, and the company backs health and wellness with Medical, Dental and Vision coverage for full‑time staff. You’ll have Unlimited Vacation, flexible hours and Work from Home support, plus daily drinks, snacks and catered meals when you’re in the office. Waabi also runs regular team‑building activities and events, on-site, off-site and virtually, and notes that the list of perks continues to evolve as the company grows. This position is remote, open to candidates in the US and Canada, and Waabi is an equal opportunity employer that values diversity and inclusion, with accommodations available for qualified applicants as required by law.

Waabi is a technology startup building technologies to transform the way the world moves. Join the team to shape the future and to make an impact.

Advice for applicants

For your resume, foreground roles where you owned the full compensation cycle and led benchmarking across multiple locations, tying those experiences to Waabi’s growth milestones, funding outlook, and geographic expansion.

When you describe your qualifications, cite concrete examples of how you designed compensation philosophy, structure and programs that cover base, variable, and equity components. Mention the benchmarking surveys you used (Radford, Carta, Pave) and any forecasting models you built that informed decisions.

In interviews, be ready to discuss translating complex compensation topics for executives and board members, including how you’ve prepared materials for board review and how you’ve ensured pay equity and compliance across regions.

Consider asking about how Waabi plans to evolve its compensation framework as it scales, how the team collaborates with Finance and Recruiting on offers, and how AI tools are expected to streamline the cycle and analysis going forward.